Nobody wants to sit where I am and think now about what
‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’ happened in order to avoid this.Hillary Clinton (26 Oct 1947 – )

Back a few weeks ago (Wednesday 23 January), Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State, gave testimony before the Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees on the disaster in Benghazi, Libya back in September. She played feisty piñata to that august gathering as they took their caustic swings at her.

She’s not my favorite politician, but the attack on her by this group of stellar Monday-morning quarterbacks, each and every one of whom would of course have done things entirely differently (and perfectly), is, if predictable, disgraceful.

Ain’t hindsight wonnerful?

Given the caustically ugly ‘gotcha’ mores of our current political culture one should perhaps not be surprised. It’s free TV time, and, with a mahhhvelous cover for personal paybacks to her, her boss and her husband for all their delicts real and mostly imagined, the pre-cognizant wizards running this classy witch hunt can hide behind many screens of objective fact-finding.

There is no human being on earth who can anticipate what the ideological lunatics of every ilk colonizing every corner of the globe are going to do tomorrow. As for the ‘cables’ – well, I’ve read that the State Department gets something like 1,250,000 cables a year (that’s over 3,400 cables every day, which is over 140 cables an hour) from everywhere about everything. Sure, the buck stops at her desk, so to speak, and it’s obvious in hindsight that more might well have been done. Now imagine that Hillary, having read and/or been made aware of these cables requesting more security, had authorized, say, $25,000,000 to beef up defensive measures at the embassy … I can hear these same wise solons who are now flaying her for the attack that cost four American lives (including that of the ambassador, Chris Stevens) then flaying her for over-reacting by “just throwing taxpayer money” at a nebulous problem. And these, we should note, would, I believe, be the same pious paladins of the people’s purse who ‘just throw taxpayer money’ in the billions into sinkholes in Afghanistan, quicksand in Congo, ‘hoods in Egypt and, I feel dreadfully confident, will soon be authorizing a papering of the sere sands of northern Mali with further bottomless billions of ‘foreign aid’ — to be financed on the nation’s MasterCard.

Clinton’s “’coulda, shoulda, woulda’” is about as right-on as could be about this whole dreadful situation. It all flows downhill, of course, and she just happens to be sitting at the bottom of a slippery slope that was built by a series of variously incompetent and prevaricating predecessors high and low.

Personally – and remember, I am not a fan of this Secretary of State – I think she is owed a serious apology by the sanctimonious inquisitors who are trying to burn her at the stake.